Gringai Torikotti bullroarer

Torikotti

Torikotti: the Gringai name for the bullroarer used in their initiation ceremonies.

The Gringai of the Williams River country dreaded thunder: it was the anger of Coen, the being who presided over their world. He is the Koin whom Threlkeld's Awabakal neighbours described as a black-painted figure carrying a fire-stick, who comes ahead of the gatherings where the ceremonies are held. At the Gresford initiation the boy was painted red and seated in an earthen ring while the women lay around it with covered faces; he was led, eyes to the ground, to a second ring, shown the carved trees, secluded some ten days to learn the songs and dances, then washed, repainted white, and returned to the women's camp. 'The bull-roarer is called by the Gringai Torikotti,' Howitt records, 'and is used in these ceremonies.' The account reached him from the Allyn River settler J. W. Boydell through John Fraser of Maitland — the same scholar whose Awabakal volume preserves Koin.

The Gringai had a great dread of thunder, and believed it to be the demonstration of the anger of some supernatural being, rebuking them for some impropriety.

Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), p. 431

Particulars

Object

Bullroarer named Torikotti, used in the Gresford Gringai initiation ceremony.

Function

Used in the Gresford-district initiation (twin earthen rings, carved trees, ten-day seclusion) presided over, in Howitt's account of these tribes, by the being Coen/Koin